An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which follows the ex-VP’s continuing attempts to raise awareness of global warming, made $900,000 across 180 screens on the weekend of August 4-6, according to Box Office Mojo.

But the original made $1,356,387 across just 77 screens at the same point in its run in 2006, leaving Paramount’s confidence in the movie’s appeal looking misplaced.

I guess congratulations are in order for Nolan managing to unite high-brow male critics and very annoying people on Twitter under a common bromance, but to me, Dunkirk felt like an excuse for men to celebrate maleness—which apparently they don’t get to do enough.

Yes. Can confirm; saw the movie at the weekend: the film really does celebrate maleness.

It celebrates the kind of maleness which – contra Marie Claire‘s movie critic Mehera Bonner – we hear all too little of these days in this feminised, unpatriotic, self-hating age when papers like the Guardian think the time is now ripe to publish essays like this:

Actor Ed Norton has proposed a brilliant idea to help make residents of New York and California poorer and even more heavily regulated than they are already: they should unilaterally declare independence from President Trump’s climate policies and remain in the UN Paris Agreement.

Giving a Master class in Lodz, Poland, where Norton was due later Friday to be honored with a “Glocal Hero” award at the closing of the 7th edition of the Transatlantyk Film Festival, Norton said between them, New York and California represent the “third largest economy in the world.” The commitment of those two states, along with a further “40 or 50” mayors and municipalities across the United States, would more than make up for the formal abandonment of the climate change treaty by the U.S. government, he said.

“The truth is that the citizens of the U.S do not need Donald Trump to stay in the Paris Climate Accord,” the actor told an audience of more than 1,000 at a Masterclass hosted by the festival in the Grand Theater in Lodz.

The Sausage Party star is correct on one point. There is absolutely nothing to stop U.S. states or municipalities pretending that they are still in the Paris Climate Accord in order to make some kind of symbolic point about the planet. It’s not, after all, like anyone is going to be able to notice the difference: the agreement was never a binding one.

Bill Nye has a new nickname. It’s not as snappy as his old one, “the Science Guy,” but it’s a lot more accurate. Nye wants all the old people to die, preferably sooner rather than later, because they stand in the way of his holy mission to save the planet from climate change.

Climate change deniers, by way of example, are older. It’s generational. So we’re just going to have to wait for those people to “age out,” as they say. “Age out” is a euphemism for “die.” But it’ll happen, I guarantee you — that’ll happen.

Perhaps he could have some help from his zany colleague Marcello Arguello, a stand-up comedian who writes scripts for his Emmy-nominated [lol] show Bill Nye Saves The World.

Arguello apparently shares his enthusiasm for some kind of old peoples’ cull, as she recently confided to her friends on Twitter in the wake of the Congressional baseball shootings.

She subsequently deleted the tweet but expressed no regrets for the sentiment.

Elsewhere in his LA Times interview, Nye was given space to rehearse many of his favorite straw men arguments about climate change.

Like the one about climate skepticism being the same as not believing in the moon landings:

Those of you out here who want to deny humans landing on the moon, if you’re into that — look at the amount of paper NASA generated. You couldn’t afford to fake that much paper! I’m not kidding, you guys. It’d be prohibitively expensive. There’s warehouses full of documents, of specifications and drawings and engineering drawings and so on — just that alone would overwhelm you as a faker.

And the one about people who aren’t “experts” being incapable of forming an intelligent opinion about climate change:

Dunkirk is a great movie but there aren’t enough “women” or “people of color” in it, according to a review in USA Today.
The movie – with a cast including Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh, and former One Direction singer Harry Styles – has been given a slew of five-star reviews for its vivid, nail-biting depiction of the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in 1940.

But though USA Today’s reviewer praised it too, he couldn’t resist giving it a little rap on the knuckles about its shameful lack of diversity and equality:

The trio of timelines can be jarring as you figure out how they all fit, and the fact that there are only a couple of women and no lead actors of color may rub some the wrong way.

Yes, it’s true that Dunkirk’s leading roles are indeed dominated by white European males.

But one possible reason for this is that Dunkirk was an actual historical event which director Christopher Nolan has gone to considerable trouble to recreate as accurately as possible.

Gore, who was speaking at an event to promote his latest global warming propaganda documentary – An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power – said the Brexit vote in Britain last summer was the result of “political instability” created by the “stress” caused by climate-change induced chaos in the Middle East.

It all began in Syria, Gore explained, unchallenged by a fawning interviewer from the film magazine Empire.

“One of the lines of investigation [scientists] have been pursuing has led them to the conclusion that significant areas of the Middle East and North Africa are in danger of becoming uninhabitable

“And, just a taste of this, to link it to some of the events that the UK and European Union are going through – think for a moment about what happened in Syria.

“Before the gates of hell opened in Syria, what happened was a climate-related extreme drought.

“From 2006 to 2010, 60 per cent of the farms in Syria were destroyed… and 80 per cent of the livestock were killed. The drought in the eastern Mediterranean is the worst ever on record – the records only go back 900 years, but it’s historic.

“And 1.5 million climate refugees were driven into the cities in Syria, where they collided with refugees from the Iraq War.

“Wikileaks revealed the internal conversations in the Syrian government where they were saying to one another ‘we can’t handle this, there’s going to be a social explosion’. There are other causes of the Syrian civil war, but this was the principal one.”

This, Gore went on to explain, led to an “incredible flow of refugees into Europe, which is creating political instability and which contributed in some ways to the desire of some in the UK to say ‘whoa, we’re not sure we want to be part of that anymore’”.

Climate change denial is a “crime against humanity” which should be punishable by trial in a world court says Monty Python’s Eric Idle.

But it’s OK. Even though he does apparently believe that the punishment for such “stupidity and ignorance” should be death, Idle generously insists that these deniers should be “put down” humanely.

This, I am sure we can all agree, is very big of him.

What’s sadder, though, perhaps is that from now on every time we watch the final scene of Monty Python’s Life of Brian and the bit where Eric Idle says from the cross “Cheer up Brian…”, before launching into “Always Look On the Bright Side Of Life”, we won’t be able to laugh any more.

The BBC has been censured for allowing actress Emma Thompson to spout a load of hysterical, made-up, warmista drivel about climate change on the supposedly respectable and balanced news analysis programme Newsnight.

But it does at least hint at an acknowledgement of something the BBC has never admitted before: that where climate change is concerned, its coverage is so hopelessly biased that any talking heads who come on to speak for the warmist side of the argument can get away with murder.

On 2 September 2015 an actress appeared on BBC Two’s Newsnight being interviewed about climate change (which she had campaigned on recently). During the interview she made inaccurate statements about climate threats. This included the claim that if they [oil companies] take out of the earth all the oil they want to take out, you look at the science – our temperature will rise 4 degrees Celsius by 2030, and that’s not sustainable. Scientific research suggests that this temperature rise is in fact likely to be arrived at much later – the World Bank, for example, puts it at “by the end of the century”. However, the statement, and others like it, were not challenged in any way in the programme by the presenter.

Indeed Maitlis should have done. In her defence, though, global warming is so specialised a topic that it’s nigh-on impossible as a generalist news TV presenter to know whether the impressive-sounding statistics being spouted by your celebrity guest are accurate or totally made up. Indeed, the only person anywhere within the BBC sufficiently well-informed to do so is Andrew Neil.

But the idea – which the report entertains – that this can simply be solved by the BBC’s staffers being more mindful of statistical accuracy in the future is clearly a nonsense.

The rot is much deeper than that. As I’ve reported before here the BBC’s bias on environmental issues is entrenched, institutional and undoubtedly in breach of its charter.

Though the BBC Trust is the watchdog supposed to fix this, its track record hitherto does not inspire much confidence.

All hail Clint Eastwood for saying the unsayable: that Generation Snowflake are a bunch of politically correct pussies; that Donald Trump is preferable to Hillary.

Now rack your brains and try to think of anyone of Clint’s celebrity eminence who’d admit to such views on the record. Charlton Heston, possibly, except he’s no longer with us. Michael Caine is the only living movie star I can think of – but he’s English so his views on the US presidential election wouldn’t carry quite so much weight.

How depressing is it that the entire universe of celebrity is so politically one-sided?

None more depressing, I’d say. If you believe, as Andrew Breitbart did, that “politics is downstream from culture” then it clearly matters very much what our movie and TV stars, pop idols, comics and so on think.

Why do you think Hillary had so many of them surrounding her at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia recently?

Because, duh, there’s a significant chunk of the voting populace which doesn’t give a damn whether or not their potential next president is a lying, cheating, email-hiding, Benghazi-tainted, crony-capitalist, continuation-Obama witch. All that matters to them is knowing they’re on the same team as Katy Perry, Sigourney Weaver, Elizabeth Banks, Meryl Streep and the incredible chick who played Hit Girl in Kick-Ass.

Like lots of people I’m in two minds about Britain’s EU referendum. The arguments presented by both sides seem so powerfully convincing.

On the one hand, there are the Brexiteers, who point out that the EU economy is shrinking, that its regulatory burden is holding back our business; that outside the EU we’d be richer and freer; that we’d regain control of our borders and be in a better position to protect ourselves against the wave of potential terrorists that Angela Merkel is determined to make EU citizens in order to punish us all for what Germany did in World War II; that we’d no longer be controlled by democratically unaccountable, faceless, supremely untalented apparatchiks who, in their own countries wouldn’t be deemed fit to take the orders at Domino’s Pizza, but who thanks to the EU, in the case of Baroness “Who?” Ashton got to swan around on £400,000 a year like she was some major international powerbroker; that it’s a nonsense to argue that Britain needs to belong to a crippled, spavined, sclerotic, inefficient, wasteful, monumentally corrupt socialistic superstate when, actually it used to do perfectly well for itself for two hundred odd years when it ran half the world. For more details on this see, for example, the very excellent Brexit The Movie.

But I’ve been listening to the arguments advanced by the Remain camp with Prime Minister David Cameron very much setting the dignified, civilised, intelligent, measured, thoughtful tone – and they’re very compelling too. Here are some of the best: Boris Johnson’s wife may have had an affair – or if it wasn’t her, it was possibly someone a bit like her – or maybe not; Boris Johnson used the word “Hitler” in a newspaper article and if you use the word “Hitler” you lose automatically; Boris Johnson smells of poo-poo and wee-wee and actually loves the EU and only says the opposite because it’s opposite month and also because he just wants the job of Prime Minister, so there; David Cameron has agreed to pose looking self-conscious and awkward for a Remain campaign publicity shot while walking across the zebra crossing at Abbey Road which is amazing because it’s just what popular beat combo the Beatles did on one of their most famous album covers and the Beatles wrote Strawberry Fields and Eleanor Rigby so Remain must be a good thing.

So you see, it’s been a tricky one. Which is why, for some time now, I have been looking for guidance one way or another from the sort of people whose gravitas, clear-sightedness and deep knowledge I can rely on.

The blond lefty actor who played one of the wacky DJs in Richard Curtis’s collectably lame The Boat The Rocked, say. Where does he stand on the EU referendum?

Or the anti-fracking mad catwoman who virtually invented punk by realising that instead of using giant safety pins for just nappies (that’s diapers, you American readers) they could also be inserted through leather jackets or even parts of your anatomy.

Or the guy who played Alan Turing in that somewhat trite movie which turned the Bletchley codebreaking story into one about gay martyrdom – and who loves to sound off on all sorts of Social Justice issues, as you would, when you’re from the rough side of the tracks having only been educated at Harrow, not Eton.

Or the spy author who hasn’t written a good book since the Cold War days – unless, of course, you think the greatest threat to global security right now are sinister Big Business interests working with the American secret service, in cahoots with the wicked Israelis, and posho Englishmen in pin-stripes with posho accents because they’re really posh, in which case of course, you’ll love everything he writes because it’s the same every time?

Or that good-looking actor who shags everyone?

Or the Social Justice campaigner – another Old Harrovian – who actually wrote The Boat That Rocked?

Or the priapic comedian who used to do funny stuff till he realised his main mission in life was to destroy the freedom of the British press?